... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 28) December 1994 Last| Contents| Next Issue 28 The liberal apocalypse: or, understanding the 1970s and 80s We've just had another burst of intellectual activity around the Thatcher years. We've seen recently: Richard Cockett's Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution 1931-83, (Harper Collins, London, 1994, 25.00); 'Mrs Thatcher and the Intellectuals', by Brian Harrison, in 20th Century British History, vol. 5, no. 2, 1994;* and 'Second-Hand Dealers in Ideas; Think-Tanks and Thatcherite Hegemony' by Radhika Desai in the New Left Review, no. 203, 1994. [* The 20th ...

... expect to lose the 2010 general election. The possibility of a hung Parliament appears to have genuinely taken it by surprise – at all levels.2 This is odd. Any reading of the 2005 result ought to have signalled problems: Labour had won a majority with a seriously diminished vote; the Conservatives had (finally) made some gains; the Liberal Democrats had advanced further; support for the SNP, Plaid Cymru, UKIP, the Green Party, the BNP and Respect had grown; and for the second successive election the largest bloc within the electorate was those who didn't vote at all. Anyone with experience of electoral politics should have looked at the figures and concluded that the UK ...

... against prominent Saudis. In all these cases, the concern was ultimately with the conduct of all banks in acting as flags of convenience for illiberal interests. By punishing one, the 'system' warned many others that the world had changed. The details of the issues are not important although all three were intimately related to the policy priorities of liberal modernisers concerned with international relations. Each was also about the blind eye that had been offered in the past to the actions of its allies by the US for 'realist' political gain. The international nature of the operation was apparently demonstrated by a common denominator in these three cases which remains unexplained – unless, as we say, it ...

... ran for the Save London Alliance) and in Westminster. The biggest upset came in Hammersmith and Fulham where the Save London Alliance put up 18 candidates. Their intervention resulted in a split vote in Addison ward, where Labour lost 2 seats to the Conservatives. Because of this the council became hung with the balance of power held by 2 Liberal councillors. After a week's deliberations locally and with their national HQ (and substantial press coverage in The Evening Standard and The Guardian) the Liberals voted to put the Conservatives into power and Labour into opposition. With the skids already under the Callaghan government this was a reasonably heavy blow to strike. A year later one of the Conservative ...

... science at the University of Pennsylvania; who believes, however, that Strauss's true message has been distorted by his self-styled 'disciples'. That may well be so, though some of Strauss's echt ideas still seem pretty wild to me. One is his theory of the 'Last Men', indebted to Nietzsche. These are the products of modern liberal civilisation, who have been softened, weakened and 'feminised' by comfort and democracy. The solution, thought Strauss, was a good bracing war or two. Apart from this, however, it is not always clear from Norton's book which of the 'Straussian' ideas she is describing are his, which are natural developments of his ideas ...

... a majority to begin with (they only won 191 seats in 1923- and only contested 427 out of 615); or that they had a serious prospect of winning one in 1924 (there were only about 100 winnable marginals, and only 40 of those were Tory-Labour- the rest were either Liberal-held, or three-way splits, when the Liberals had been keeping Labour out of office since 1923); or that the Tories' 154 net gains in 1924 came from Labour (two thirds were from the Liberals); or that the increase in the Tory vote came from former Labour voters. Labour's numerical vote increased by 24%: if Zinoviev was meant to reduce the Labour ...

... officials who saw that German security depended on a restoration of good relations between the faiths, not excluding the Jews themselves. This was a view shared by many senior figures in a Church riddled with guilt at its implicit pact of tolerance with the Nazi devil and determined not to make the same mistake with communism, especially at a time when liberation theology was taking hold of its liberal wing. Pope Benedict is clearly his own man but there is now good reason to take a much greater interest in the close liaison between the Vatican and the various anti-communist intelligence operations which developed in Europe under the wing of the United States and that are now coalescing into the pan-European security agency of ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42) Winter 2001/2 Last| Contents| Next Issue 42 Historical Notes Scott Newton Blair and Gladstone Tony Blair's Labour Party conference speech this year galvanised the delegates who were especially moved by his suggestions that Britain could play the role of an international troubleshooter, bringing liberal values, civilisation and the benefits of its skills in conflict resolution to troubled parts of the world. There were however some more critical voices, among them that of the distinguished modern British historian Richard Shannon, who accused Blair (Guardian, 3 October 2001) of resurrecting 'Gladstonian imperialism'. What did he mean and is there anything in the charge? Gladstone was the ...

... cooperation. Full employment in the domestic economy would be guaranteed by an international order which made impossible the competitive currency devaluations and protectionism of the interwar years. The arrangements for this new dispensation could only be made by the Anglo-Americans, who were committed by history and their inheritance of an economic tradition rooted in the tradition of Adam Smith to economic liberalism- albeit a liberalism refurbished by the lessons of Keynes' General Theory and the New Deal. During the pre-war years, when many had found their political homes in Berlin or Moscow, Keynes had found inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Washington. It was quite natural that as the war approached its conclusion the two victorious western powers should build ...

... as far as we would have liked from being a clique of gentleman desirous of preserving their property. Investigators in both the US and in the UK have tended to assume that journalists should be concerned solely with failures to follow the rules (hypocrisy) or with anomalies and injustices for which new rules should be created. Investigators are almost painfully liberal. The forms of constitutionalism are important to them and this quaint belief in the system working properly, rather like the belief of peasants that the Little Father, the Tsar, would improve matters if only he knew what was going on, may have halted investigation into the flaws in the system itself, in the way that the rules ...